You can play all the classes and races without owning the higher versions of the game now, but fair warning, the Goblin, Worgen, and Pandaren starting zones can be pretty long if you're mostly looking to check out the main world. And those zones could cover most of the 20 levels you get in trial. Still worth a look, but it will take some time before you get dropped into a home city.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

I did roll a worgen but I really don't like the shuffling animation once you become one--it kind of hurt my head so I'm not playing that. I'm seeing how gnomes and (this weekend) how humans and nelfs play. I still refuse to play squid heads

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

paulWTAMU wrote:I did roll a worgen but I really don't like the shuffling animation once you become one--it kind of hurt my head so I'm not playing that. I'm seeing how gnomes and (this weekend) how humans and nelfs play. I still refuse to play squid heads space goats.

FTFY.

I play Horde here, so I'm a bit biased in my experience.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

I got a "resurrections scroll" from a friend that I could use solely because my account had been inactive for so long, and yeah, I remember why I quit. I just kinda got bored with the core WoW experience. Hey, free upgrades for WotLK and Cataclysm, though.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

Hit 90 and started up daily quests. I'm liking that you can do as many or as few as you want (more is obviously better for getting stuff), but it's even nicer to see more quests the work into your secondary professions. I'm hoping to see main professions so far, but I've only been doing Cloud Serpent, Tillers, Anglers, and the 90-zone quests (Golden Lotus?).

I've also started checking out scenarios. I would love to see some of them scale to raid sizes--like Theramore--but they're pretty short a sweet...just about perfect for some quick action. It would be even cooler if they tuned some of the holiday bosses to be scenarios considering how short they are.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

I'm calling blizzard this weekend to try to get my old main back. I like some of the changes, and can see playing casually. Particularly with a kid on the way, something I putz around on at home for cheap sounds good (I'm also buying a Prime subscription).

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

So how are all the wow players enjoying the new expansion? So far so good for me, got my main to 90 already and slowly grinding profs and leveling alts. There are a lot of dailies to do, but to avoid burnout on dailies I am limiting how many I do every day. A lot of my guildies got caught up in the do dailies to get rep and buy gear like cata, but you really can just run heroics and not really do dailies and then jump into raids. Still getting used to all the changes on my alts, fortunately my rogue really didn't change much.

I am levelling slowly. I enjoy the pet fighting quest chain and the farming in Halfhill. Cooking seems challenging with a lot of recipes and achievements, so that will give me something to do for a while. I also enjoy using the auction house via my phone. We've been progressing steadily on our guild levelling since they made it so easy. I kinda wish they had added more guild levels like they proposed since we will max out eventually.

They messed with the talent system too much. Playing Chrono Trigger recently reminded me of how to do a lot with a little. I think that was a lost art till all these indie games started popping up, thankfully. But yeah, the new talent system is just too rigid. RPG's used to rely on making your own choices and having some sort of control over your character. When everyone is using the same armor and spec, it might as well be a mass multiplayer online fantasy simulator or something. besides, they ruined totems

I might give it a shot when winter sets in and going out side is totally worthless. Who knows...

Starfalcon wrote:So how are all the wow players enjoying the new expansion? So far so good for me, got my main to 90 already and slowly grinding profs and leveling alts. There are a lot of dailies to do, but to avoid burnout on dailies I am limiting how many I do every day. A lot of my guildies got caught up in the do dailies to get rep and buy gear like cata, but you really can just run heroics and not really do dailies and then jump into raids. Still getting used to all the changes on my alts, fortunately my rogue really didn't change much.

So what is everyone's opinion on the new exp and what do you think?

I got my subtlety rogue to 90 first via questing Ilvl440, and am now nearly 88 on my frost DK Ilvl415. Both are now homed at two moons. Its crazy that my DK can pull twice the DPS of my rogue. I can't seem to generate over about 20K dps with the rogue and more typically 11-15K. Its making me crazy. The DK does 20-40K dps. I was doing 20K plus with my rogue in the last expansion. Its embarrassing to be at the bottom of the DPS heap in heroics with the rogue. Its making me crazy.

superjawes wrote:The talent trees have been solved for years. Just find your way to ElitistJerks or Noxxic.com and you'll get the best correct trees.

However, trees are going away in about 11 days. Instead, you'll be choosing a set of abilities that can be more readily changed like glyphs.

Side note, it's "Pandaria," not "Pandora." The latter is for Borderlands

I thought it was clear, from my complaints about movement speed that I was using the recommended subtlety DPS specs for 5-mans. I liked ElitistJerks the best because there was more detail at least for the last expansion. Noxxic however, is nice for a quick look.

Mr Bill wrote:I got my subtlety rogue to 90 first via questing Ilvl440, and am now nearly 88 on my frost DK Ilvl415. Both are now homed at two moons. Its crazy that my DK can pull twice the DPS of my rogue. I can't seem to generate over about 20K dps with the rogue and more typically 11-15K. Its making me crazy. The DK does 20-40K dps. I was doing 20K plus with my rogue in the last expansion. Its embarrassing to be at the bottom of the DPS heap in heroics with the rogue. Its making me crazy.

Frost DK. That's why he's doing so much DPS. I think both frost builds (2H and DW) are among the top overall, and certainly the best of the Str DPS classes.

Although I'm not sure if DPS meters are working properly just yet. We had a guild MM hunter only registering 3.5k on recount while hitting sizeable crits. That really sucks if you're raiding and someone decides to kick you, but it may be possible that you're doing more DPS that just isn't being seen.

Or maybe fights are being tuned so that subtlety get screwed. That could be the case, too.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

We were running random heroics two nights ago and there was a fire mage doing over 70K dps. He averaged over 60K for the whole run. On the other hand we were doing the boss that turns into a whirlwind two nights ago. We wiped over and over (not with that mage; but with a very good set of guildies: Pali tank, survivor hunter, frost DK and my subtlety rogue). We were all avoiding the whirlwind stunt but heals still failed, somehow getting caught every time even after we explained our routine for avoiding the aoe. After wiping 4-6 times with several different heals (one of which had never been there and was barely geared), my fellow guildies gave up in disgust. I half-wondered if it was partly due to my rogue only doing 15K dps. We have a healer in the guild who is a fantastic healer and also tanks really well, but he was not able to be with us that night. I recall some scenerios in HoTs where the boss gets tougher if the run gets too long. But this same group was doing those HoTs in record times. The tank reported doing the scenerio the next day a couple times with no trouble.

What you said about recount may be true. I was getting crits in the 40-60K range.

I got my main back and am having fun. The wife and I are working opposite shifts for a while so it's a good way to kill time after working out--it's winterish so the parks and all that stuff close early.

I'm enjoying it. The zones in Panderia are pretty nice. The questing so far is fun. Haven't done a ton with professions though.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

Overall disappointing. I resubbed as all my friends came back and I missed them. Pandaria is a pita. You only get 2-3 quests and you can't pick up more then that. You have to finish those quests before you can get new quests. Those 2-3 quests involve killing monsters, picking up items, and using a item on something. The monsters you have to kill are usually pretty sparsely laid out with other 'fodder' monsters you don't need in between so you can't pull a bunch of the monsters you need and DPS them all down. This makes leveling as a tank ridiculously slow (I did prot paladin from 85-88 before changing to ret). You can't power through the quests, there is too much dialogue, and cutscenes you can't skip are also a huge pita. I really pity anyone who has to level alts up through pandaria. Even though they tried to makes the quests fun it's still the same crap with a different color. Really GW2 got questing right and after leveling up through GW2 WoW just seemed extremely painful.

If it was just kill X monsters and you could get five at a time with maybe some pickup stuff quests it would've been a whole lot less painful. The quest monsters are really sparse too, not just in how far they're spread out, but how many total number of spawns there are for them. For some quests you need to kill 10 monsters and there is only 5 spawns, so you have to wait around for them to spawn. More so if there is more then one person doing the same quest, which lead to monster 'lines' where multiple people are all gunning for the same spawns. It doesn't help that monsters have quite a bit more HP then in previous expansion packs too. Overall the leveling experience in MoP takes a heck of a lot longer then in other expansions.

MoP heroics are painfully easy. As opposed to Catas being redonkulously painfully hard at the beginning. Wrath had the right difficulty level as far as heroics went and the right reward system as well. It really is hard to die in heroics. I'm pulling multiple packs as a prot paladin and we just DPS them all down. I've only wiped on a couple bosses... I have wiped on trash pulls simply by pulling too many, but boss wipes almost never happen (the only one being the bomb guy from the sap tree place, when no one knows what to do with bombs or I eat two at once). Somehow that fight escaped nerfs. Overall it seems like the heroics were made to be more difficult but Blizzard nerfed the stuffing out of them and subsequently changed the rewards system to reflect that. Like you can eat a bosses main damage dealing ability that you're supposed to dodge and easily survive. The carpet bombing guy in the tower you just have ranged DPS stand in and DPS the boss down. Definitely nerfs and hasty ones at that as some mechanics which seem like they would be just a side note do a lot more damage then main damage dealing mechanics in boss fights. Such as the poison the wall shredder guy drops under himself does quite a bit of damage compared to his arm 'power assault'. Some boss fights are way too scripted too. Like where you have to sit at the top and throw sap at the people below. Pretty tedious stuff.

Turning rep grinds back on is stupid. I have no desire to dailies and I will not subject myself to such tedious brain numbing, IQ reducing torture. So that makes my tailoring completely worthless as I need to rep grind in order to get recipes (**** stupid). Subsequently also makes it so I can't buy VP gear. You don't really get JPs till you hit 90, so that also makes JPs worthless.

Talent trees have been turned into utter garbage (there is more choice involved in glyphing then in picking talents). Classes have been homogenized to the point that they don't even feel defined. The mana bar on prot and ret paladins is completely pointless, it could be replaced with rage and it wouldn't change anything... probably actually make the class more fun. Holy power is completely pointless as abilities that use it don't really do a whole lot for prot or ret. Stats have been made waaay to simplistic. Gearing is way too simplistic. Overall they took all the fun elements out of WoW and tried to make it more like your typical shooter on rails. Honestly it seems like they were trying to copy GW2 and ended up completely fubaring what made WoW WoW.

I don't think I'll be subbed for more then one or two months including the first. The fun to time ratio is just completely off the mark for MMOs now days, when you can simply hop into a different game and start having fun right away. No one wants to spend time doing things they don't want to so they can spend time doing things they find fun. We do that in life, that's called work.

Bensam123 wrote:Holy power is completely pointless as abilities that use it don't really do a whole lot for prot or ret.

Okay, this is 100% wrong. Both of those specs revolve entirely around the generation and use of holy power. For prot you use it to increase your block chance (Shield of the Righteous) thus reducing physical damage, but using Shield of the Righteous also stacks a buff to increase the healing of Word of Glory (which you can use to self heal).

Retribution is about generating holy power to keep Inquisition up and to get in as many Templar's Verdicts as you can. TV is basically your nuke ability, and prioritizing which abilities to generate holy power also increases your DPS.

I can understand not liking that, but holy power is one of the things that makes paladins unique, and has worked out extremely well over the past two expansions.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

shaq--the city parks are open, but the state park nearby closes at 6 throughout the winter--it basically follows the daylight (summer it's open till 9 or 10, winter it's 6 during the week). It makes me sad.

I'm digging not having mana on a hunter now, but I don't like how bland talent trees are. Specializations seem like they matter more than talents at this stage. I also feel gimped in terms of DPS, although maybe I'm just a bad.

Dungeons are stupidly easy, but kind of fun.

Rep grinds I'm not in on yet, we'll see.

Quest...my biggest beef is how damn long these quest lines are. I would like to actually clean my log out; it's full. Everytime I turn in a quest it spawns at least one more, sometimes 2-3.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

The overall consensus is that hunters are gimped in PvE right now actually. We do OK burst but we can't sustain it so in dungeons or on boss fights...I don't know about PvP much, I just do the odd BG when I feel like it. But yeah we use focus. There's been a lot of reorganization of classes now.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

I don't have all the rankings in front of me, but I do feel bad for hunters. All three specs rank low right now, which means you can't even switch specs to better on DPS charts.

As for class reorganization, I mostly like the changes they made. More secondary and/or unique resources give some flavor to a class. I meantioned this above, but I really like holy power for Paladins. On the other hand...warlocks are weird, IMO. As Affliction, I rarely used soul shards because the rotation didn't require them, but now they're the only spec using them. Embers for Destruction and Demonic Fury are cool ideas, but I'm not sure how much sense it makes to have a unique resource for EVERY warlock spec.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

is leatherworking still viable for decent pre-raid gear? I don't plan on raiding at all unless it's changed, but I'd like at least OK gear and want to know if it's worth leveling LW. Gold isn't much of a problem; I've got about 5-6k after buying my 310% flying mount speed training

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

My level 90 rogue (Ilvl 440) is horribly gimped right now making about 15-20K DPS. So, yeah maybe I am not the best rogue player. But my 5 man friends are all commenting that my low DPS is terrible in MoP. Don't even mention PVP. Reveal even for a second and you are rooted six different ways and then they all stand in a circle and take turns. Its humiliating. My level 87 frost (DK Ilvl 414) on the other hand is quite a lot of fun now.

World of Warcraft is feeling. Who needs a social life? Can't wait log in and hop on a griffin.....sorry i was just listening to that song yesterday and memories of the early and mid 2000s overwhelmed me.

nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

Mr Bill wrote:My level 90 rogue (Ilvl 440) is horribly gimped right now making about 15-20K DPS. So, yeah maybe I am not the best rogue player. But my 5 man friends are all commenting that my low DPS is terrible in MoP. Don't even mention PVP. Reveal even for a second and you are rooted six different ways and then they all stand in a circle and take turns. Its humiliating. My level 87 frost (DK Ilvl 414) on the other hand is quite a lot of fun now.

Yeah after I hit 86 and my secondary stats started ratcheting down I really felt very energy starved compared to where I was. Now that I my ilvl is at 465 now, I don't feel so starved..but my haste is still about 10-15% lower than it was. My toon is not nearly as spammy as it was, but I am doing more dps than I could at 85..but now that I can hit the hit and exp caps without having to reforge for them I can switch to going for haste.

Well, this week, I ran some heroics doing the lamest possible damage (sub 20K) and managed to pick up the Ilvl 470 Halloween agility ring, a very nice Ilvl 470 +873 agility trinket (to replace the Brewmaster stamina beer stein), and a 2.5K dps dagger (offhand is 2.1K dps); all of which bumped my Ilvl to 447. Suddenly I have more AP, going from about 16000 to 25000 and I am seeing dps ranging up into the mid 20s and even as high as the low 30's on some fights. But I also talented for shadow focus instead of night stalker and glyphed for expose armor. That talent change let me use shadow dance for no energy cost and may be responsible more than the gear for bumping my dps up 50%; at the expense of once again being slower than the rest of the 5-man in movement.

I just could not give up shadow step for preparation even though it will reset disarm, vanish, cloak of shadows, evasion, and sprint. I guess I will have to, to get the next step higher dps (because of resetting disarm and vanish). But to my mind, sprint is a poor substitute for shadow step and not as fun. So, again, there turns out to be only one good set of talents for dps. And the ones that make it fun; are once again, not useful for dungeons.

Edit: also, Iike you, this latest batch of gear (above Ilvl 450) has more haste and mastery and either hit or expertise. So, instead of wasting points on crit and forcing me to reforge crit and most of the haste and mastery to cap hit and expertise I have more haste and more energy.

Edit2: Got another 2.5K dagger and another trinket and the DPS is heading up over 30K. Its a long long slog but finally starting to be worth it.